


Absolute Beginners

by Graverobber



Category: Cobra Kai (Web Series), Karate Kid (Movies)
Genre: Dancing, Dating, F/M, First Kiss, High school was bad for everyone right?, salsa - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:48:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27408316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Graverobber/pseuds/Graverobber
Summary: And now they’re back at her apartment and she’s thirty four, not seventeen, but here’s Johnny Lawrence outside her door, shifting from foot to foot, waiting for a sign that he can lean in and kiss her.
Relationships: Carmen Diaz/Johnny Lawrence
Comments: 6
Kudos: 40





	Absolute Beginners

All the way through their first date, Carmen can’t put her finger on what feels so familiar. It isn’t until they get to her front door that it hits her. It’s not just that they had talked about high school dating, it’s that the whole evening has actually felt like high school.

Dinner with the LaRussos could have been double dating with her best friend Angela and Angela's slightly annoying boyfriend back in Quinto – dinner with Margaritas and Micheladas instead of soda and illicit Pilsner, but still. Amanda had grinned across the dancefloor at her, egging her on like Angela used to do, and when Johnny’s hands brushed her waist during a turn and he rocked back with her in perfect time, she felt the same fizz of anticipation. It’s every school dance she went to, every slightly illicit trip down to the Zona Rosa with Victor that her mother never found out about. Not until it was too late, anyway.

And now they’re back at her apartment and she’s thirty four, not seventeen, but here’s Johnny Lawrence outside her door, shifting from foot to foot, waiting for a sign that he can lean in and kiss her. Inside, Miguel is probably asleep by now and that’s different, but her Ama will be waiting up for her, just like always. And like always, it’s probably equal odds whether she’s lying back on the couch with a joint or leaning up against the front door with a glass pressed to her ear.

She likes how he doesn’t touch her when they kiss. Victor liked to grab the back of her head when they made out, would slide his hand down to wrap around the back of her neck, holding her in place. He would walk around with her like that, sometimes, steering her with the pressure of his hand while other boys might sling an arm around their girlfriend’s waist or tuck a hand in their back pocket. She hated it, but she never asked him to stop. Johnny keeps his arms down by his sides, like he’s not sure if he’s allowed to touch her. She likes that.

And then after that date there’s the terrible fight at school, and Miguel is unconscious, lying stiff and perfectly flat in a neck collar in the hospital and no one will tell her if he’ll wake up the same. It’s the worst day of her life, and when she tells Johnny she never wants to see him again she means it. But then he does wake up, and he’s fine, and there’s an excruciating conversation with Sam LaRusso and Robby to get to the bottom of what really happened. Then there's a whole series of other conversations, some of which she’s there for and some of which she hears about and some of which she guesses at - at the school, at the dojo – both dojos, with the LaRussos, with Johnny’s old Sensai, who’s resurfaced from somewhere. And somewhere in there, she thinks, with Johnny and an old flame that she’s not even sure she wants to know about. 

And all of this takes time, and somewhere in the middle of it she stops never wanting to see Johnny again. She’s seen him staggering drunk, she’s seen him beaten up from brawling and folded in on himself with self-loathing, and making bad decisions and then more bad decisions. She’s seen his crappy apartment and his terrible band shirts. She’s witnessed first-hand the desolate interior of his refrigerator. He’s a mess in about a million different ways, but when he tells her he’ll always try to do the best for her son, she believes him. All of the rest of it should matter, but it doesn’t.

It takes a long time for things to get back on an even keel again, and she waits even longer to ask him out again. Her Ama would say she makes life difficult for herself. But Carmen – she’s just watching, watching and waiting. She didn’t spend enough time watching Victor, that was the problem. Everyone can fake being a good person for a little while. But she got pregnant at seventeen, dropped out of school, bound herself to a man that she didn’t really know, in the end. She only realised afterwards what he was like, what he wanted out of life and what he was prepared to do to get it. Victor could pass as a good person for a little while, but on the inside, he was rotting.

Johnny’s the opposite, she thinks. From the outside he looks like he’s barely holding it together – he’s a crumpled mess in a Metallica t-shirt, growling and hurting himself and holding it together just long enough to get around the next corner. But on the inside, she thinks – OK. She made him tres leches cake, a long time ago now, and she doesn’t regret it.

So here they are again, outside her apartment, and it’s months later but it feels just the same. She’s wearing a yellow dress, and he took her to a drive in movie, of all places. She loved it. They watched a horror film and ate popcorn cones and she sat a little closer every time there was a jump scare, and she knew exactly what she was doing. Halfway through the movie he put his arm around her. He didn’t quite yawn and stretch, but he might as well have done.

Now he’s got her backed up against her own front door – please god, let Ama be safely in bed, or at least on the sofa. He’s touching her now, but low, one big hand wrapped warm over her hip, the other sprawling over the small of her back. His littlest finger, she realises, amused, is brushing the very top of her ass – subtle enough to claim innocence if he’s called out for it. High school moves. 

Her head knocks gently against the door and he mumbles, ‘Sorry, sorry,’ and swaps their positions without opening his eyes, so now she's pulled up against him. His tongue is in her mouth, and she definitely doesn’t remember anyone kissing her this good back in Quinto. She rolls her hips experimentally up against him and feels the buzz in his chest as he groans, very quietly. The hand on her hip moves up her side, skimming over her breast in the fluorescent light of the patio. 

_Second base_ she thinks giddily, and something makes her step back, just to see if she can. He blinks like he forgot where he was. The mosquito lamp in the corner catches something and fizzes. ‘I guess it’s getting late,’ he says, passing a hand over the back of his head, sheepish. She sees what he must have looked like at seventeen, before everything started to fall down for him, walking a girl back home, making out on the front porch. She’d lost it to Victor in the back of a car when she was seventeen. Not his car – he’d borrowed it from a friend. She’s sure he told them all about it when he returned it afterwards. 

Johnny is the guy who calls women _babes_ and drives a custom stencilled muscle car and must surely be the source of the highly questionable dating wisdom she’s heard Miguel come out with from time to time. But now he’s standing a careful pace away from her, ducking his head like she might forget how tall he is. It might be the fallout from the school fight, the way he knows she lost her trust in him for a while. But she thinks it goes deeper than that.

‘I have to go,’ she says. ‘But I’ll see you soon, yes?’

‘Sure,’ he says, and he sounds so heartbreakingly unconvinced of the fact that she pushes back up onto her toes for another kiss, soft, closemouthed, a goodnight kiss. He chases her lips a little way back when she pulls away again, but his face has relaxed, and his eyes are soft again.

‘Night, Carmen,’ he says.

‘Sleep well, Johnny,’ she says as he turns for his own apartment, and catches the moment he looks back at her, half hidden by her open door, before she shuts it gently.

Her mother is watching WWE on TV – she’s a big fan of Bobby Lashley - and pretending to knit. ‘He hasn’t taken you to bed yet?’ she asks, one eyebrow raised. ‘Or is he just that quick a worker?’ She makes a hand gesture that can leave no one in any doubt as to what she means.

‘Ama!’ she says, going through the routine of being scandalised though they both know she’s too used to it to mind. But later, in her too warm room with the fan turning lazily above her head, she turns it over in her mind. She doesn’t think Johnny's going to take her to bed. She thinks he’s waiting for her to do that. They’d both been shaped by their high school days, but she’s been left watchful, guarded, needing to be in control. She has a feeling that with Johnny, it had gone a different way. She smiles in the dark.

Their third date, she asks him to take her to the beach. She’s lived here for nearly a year, but she’s never made it down there. Always working, or busy at home, or worrying about Miguel. So he takes her and he buys her a hot dog and they chase each other in and out of the surf, and they walk barefoot along the shoreline holding hands and by the time they get back it’s still early, the sun gone honey gold but not sunk behind the next block along just yet. They get to her door and he slows down, but she tightens her grip on his hand, towing him along to apartment number three.

She stops outside. ‘Can I come in?’ she asks.

‘Sure,’ he says, fumbling with his keys. ‘I didn’t – I mean, it’s not so clean in there- ’

Inside is pretty clean, actually, just not so tidy – a pile of laundry on the sofa, dishes in the sink. It’s easy to work out which door is the bedroom. The sheets look fresh but rumpled, a pillow fallen to the floor. He wasn’t expecting she’d come home with him today. Her heart squeezes. This man. 

He’s hovering behind her, not nervy, exactly, but on edge. ‘Take off your shirt,’ she says, sitting down on the edge of the bed. There are faint red marks at his neck and wrists where the sun has caught him. She’s too dark to have those, but his pale skin shows every flush. There’s a series of bruises down one side of his ribs, fist sized, fading.

Kicking practice,’ he says, seeing her looking. ‘The senior class are really coming along.’

She splays a hand around his side, careful not to press down too hard, but he sucks in a breath anyway.

Does it hurt?’ she asks.

‘Everything hurts,’ he says, and huffs out a laugh. ‘Look, Carmen, I don’t know what you thought you were getting into here, but this is me.’ He flips his arms up and down, gesturing at himself dismissively. ‘I’m pretty beat up all round.’

‘Oh, I’ve seen worse, she said, sliding her hand around to splay over his stomach, where the softness from his beer habit can’t hide the evidence of muscles underneath. His abdominals twitch under her hand.

‘Jesus, Carmen, you’re killing me here,’ he says, low voiced, but he doesn’t move.

‘Your pants,’ she says. She hardly recognises her own voice, but she wants to see him, here in this room with the late afternoon sun streaming through the window and the A/C unit rattling in the corner. He swallows, throat working, and she thinks for a moment he’ll refuse, but he just unzips without saying anything, kicks his pants off into a corner with his sneakers and leaves himself in black briefs.

There’s a strange power in being fully dressed while a mostly naked man stands in front of you in full sunlight. He squirms a little under her gaze at first, doesn’t know what to do with his hands.

‘So what, do I pass the test?’ he asks, trying to make a joke of it, but his voice sounds strained.

‘No test,’ she says, smiling up at him. ‘I like to look at you.’ Truth be told, she’s always looked. Her mother misses nothing, and it had probably been obvious how her eyes had followed him at the All-Valley contest. Then, she’d had to limit herself to the time between Miguel’s bouts, convinced that if she looked away for a moment he’d be hurt. Here, she can take her time, track long legs and cayenne coloured freckles and the fading scribble of old tattoos that she’ll have to ask him about later.

She stays like that for long moments, just looking, and when she reaches his face she holds his eyes until she sees him visibly relax, accept her words at face value, even if he doesn’t quite believe them yet. _Good_ , she thinks.

‘Come sit by me,’ she says, and he does, knee knocking against hers.

‘Hi,’ he says, very quietly, and his eyes look calmer than she’s ever seen them before. God, she wants to kiss him so much. 

She swings a knee over his hip to slide into his lap. He makes a low noise of surprise and his hands come up automatically to her waist. _Good._

‘Hi,’ she says, looking down into the wide blue of his eyes. She reaches behind herself and lifts his hands from where they’re fisting handfuls of her shirt, settling them on her bent legs instead. ‘You can touch me now,’ she says. ‘Please,’ she adds, and she means it to be polite but it comes out a little more pleading than she’d planned. She can feel him hardening against her, has to resist the urge to grind down. 

Then he grins at her, suddenly, and he’s slid his hands along her thighs and up under her skirt before she’s really realised what’s happening. His fingers trace along the edge of her underwear, dipping just underneath, and she shivers, and doesn’t feel seventeen at all. 

‘I can do that,’ he says, and she believes him, dips down to kiss him properly at last. _Good._

**Author's Note:**

> Life in California is as strange and exotic to me as life in Ecuador, so I apologise in advance for any mistakes in either case. 
> 
> Apparently battle hardened (in every sense) grown-ups getting second chances is my jam.
> 
> Also FYI, my favourite montage theme is definitely 'getting your life together through the metaphor of cleaning up your apartment'.


End file.
